My favorite Canadian pundit

Mark Steyn gave an exellent speech last August in Australia about the dangers of multiculturalism and how it subverts our culture. I find his prose humorous and easy to read which is probably why I like him so much. It's hard to believe he never graduated from high school. That either speaks volumes about Mr. Steyn, or high school. He's a perfect example of Mark Twain's famous dictum, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."

I found the transcript over at New Sisyphus. I've copied it below so it may be preserved for posterity. Happy reading!

"It's Not 'Them', It's Us: The Need to Regain Confidence in Western Culture

Thank you, thank you very much Janet. I'm honoured to be here on what's beginning to feel a bit like my End of The World Tour. Everywhere I go I just talk about depressing issues like the decline and death of the West, but my End of the World Tour is a bit like Barbara Streisand's Farewell Tour: if the world doesn't end I'll be back to do another End of the World Tour in a couple of years. Let me start with a request, I feel a bit like Kylie Minogue when the crowd call out for all the early hits. I got to Australia a week or so back and people keep asking me to repeat a quote I mentioned in a column a few months ago. We crazed right-wing war mongers are often said to be hot for war and slaughter and so forth. But I'm not. I don't want to make an argument for more war, more bombing, more killing but for more will, more civilisational confidence that's the best way to avoid all the death and destruction.

Here's what I mean, here's the quote I get requests for. It's about a relatively minor imperial administrator. Two hundred years ago, in a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of Sati-that's the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husband. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural. He said: 'You say that it's your custom to burn widows, very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their neck and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows; you may follow your custom, then we will follow ours.' As it happens, my wife's uncle was named after General Napier which I guess makes me a British Imperialist by marriage. But India today is better off without Sati. And what's so strange about the times we live in is that even to say that is to invite accusations of cultural supremacy. If you don't agree that India is better off without Sati, if you think that's just dead white-male-euro-centricism, fine, but I don't think you really do believe that. Non-judgemental multiculturalism, cultural relativism, is an obvious fraud and I think it's subliminally accepted on that basis. I think that, after all, most people, given the choice, don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. They think that pretending that all societies are equal is in a sense part of the wallpaper of living in an advanced Western society. And they think you can contain multiculturalism, they think multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting them to sing jingle bells. Or that your holistic masseur uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality. But it doesn't mean that you or anyone that you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society.

I checked into my hotel yesterday and I'd been in the room 10 minutes when I got a call from the Spa asking if I wanted to have a new kind of massage they were offering a special on using techniques I think developed from Buddhist spirituality. And I'm very grateful for that, I think its marvellous and that it adds a lot to the gaiety of life, but it's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug if it goes beyond that. And if you think Sati is just an example of the rich vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your present suburb would be like if 25, 30 or 48% of the people around you really believed in it too. That's the situation that much of the Western world is facing; that we're losing the consensus within our populations on what it means to be a citizen of a pluralist society. Multiculturalism, I believe, was conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own and in that sense it's the real suicide bomb. Islam and terrorism would not be a threat to the Western world if the Western world weren't so enervated that it gives the impression that it's basically just dying to keel over and to surrender to somebody.

Sati's gone, nobody in India burns widows, so when Indians immigrate to Sydney, or London or Toronto, they're not building pyres in the front yard for grandma anymore. But there are other cultures where women lack basic rights. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were prevented by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces; by law. As Ahmed Al-bakar (spelling unclear), an MP from the one of the more progressive Muslim nations, Kuwait, recently put it, mixing the proposal to give women the right to vote, 'God said in the Holy Koran that men are better than women...why can't we settle for that?' Why indeed. Well here's a story from the Associate Press in Multan, Pakistan. Nazeer Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25 year-old step-sister to salvage his family's honour. Well, you know, I suppose to a lot of us, Pakistan's a crazy place a long way away. But the honour killings, the murder of Muslim women, punished often for no other reason than that they happened to have been raped by some fella, the honour killings are getting closer. In London last summer, the Metropolitan police announced they were reopening investigations into 120 deaths among British Muslim girls that they'd hitherto declined to look at too closely on grounds of cultural sensitivity. Now think about that. Think about that. One hundred and twenty women are murdered and their murders go uninvestigated because the cops thought it was just some multicultural thing. I believe you had a similar issue here when one of your state police departments announced that it was changing the basis on how spousal abuse and battery of women was investigated according to what cultural community you happened to belong to. So in other words, in parts of Australia, law enforcement takes the view that whether you're allowed to beat up a woman depends on who you are. If I try it, I'll be going to jail; but if other people try it, it's part of their rich cultural tradition. You cannot have a society organised on that basis. I don't want to live in a country where honour killing is regarded as part of the rich tapestry of cultural diversity, like a slightly livelier version of a national dance at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony. So those are the sorts of things you can make judgements about competing culture, judgements on liberty, on religious freedom, the rule of law, we need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated. That's really the word: cool. You don't have to go through a whole lot of excitable talk about nuking Mecca and all this kind of thing; that's all a waste of time. If we knew who we were, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems that we seem to be having and rousing ourselves to defend our society. If we know who we are, if we're secure in our sense of where our society came from, we'll be fine.

Let me give a small example of the wrong way of looking at things. It's not life threatening, but if you don't understand the philosophy that underpins it, it can become life threatening. In your nation and in mine, many people have acknowledged, and indeed even boasted, that immigration changes our country. For example, in Australia, and to a lesser extent in Canada, there are a lot of people who wish to replace the monarchy with a republic and there are respectable arguments for and against the monarchy. But the dangerous argument is the lazy line pedalled by too many politicians that in an Australia or a Canada of evolving immigration patterns, an immigrant from Moldova or China or Brazil or Saudi Arabia can't be expected to relate to the Queen, to the existing constitutional system. Now try this line the next time you're in Saudi Arabia: if you immigrate to Saudi Arabia and say 'hey man, I just can't relate to the House of Saud, and what's with this Wahhabism, can't we get a couple of sports bars with wet t-shirt nights every Thursday'? The Saudis would have a grand old laugh about it and then behead you. So when we accept that argument, in essence we're explicitly promoting the principle of reverse assimilation; that immigration imposes not the obligation that the immigrant assimilate to his new land, but that his new land assimilate to him. And thereby lies great peril, not for the Queen, she'll get by, but for a whole bunch of the rest of us. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen, its whole merely the sum of its parts. And so in the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide. Or in the superb summation of the American writer James C. Bennett, 'democracy, immigration multiculturalism ... pick any two'.

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally valid. And to accept that proposition means denying reality; the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, global population movement. And multiculturalism isn't the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You recall Herman Goering's memorable assertion that 'two plus two makes five, if the Fuhrer wills it'. Likewise we're asked to accept that the United States' constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation. If a generation of multi-culti theorists in American universities, if the ethnic grievance lobby, and even if a ludicrous resolution of the United States congress so wills it, that's what happened. The United States Congress passed a resolution hailing the Iroquois Confederation as the inspiration for the US Constitution, which would have been news to the dead white euro-centric males who wrote it. Harmless, harmless isn't it!

What's wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other. Because it's never helpful to put reality up for grabs; there may come a day where you need it. And today is the day that we do need a shot of reality. We need to understand what it is that is important and vital and rare about our society, because if we don't, then in a thousand, silly, itsy-bitsy, little ways, like removing pork from Australian hospital cafeteria menus, we're giving the very clear message that we lack the will to defend our civilisation. In 1773, one of America's founding fathers Simeon Howard, addressed the ancient and honourable artillery company in Boston, and 'an incautious people' he said, 'may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them, especially if they're persisted in.' During the Danish cartoon Jihad, you may recall, over the representations of the prophet Mohammed earlier this year, the New York Times gave one of its routinely pompous explanations as to why it wouldn't be showing readers these offensive cartoons: sensitive news organisations, the editors explained, have the duty to 'refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbol symbols'. The very next day, the Times illustrated the story on the Danish controversy with an illustration of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung ... a piece of New York art from a couple of seasons earlier. They had no problem with gratuitous assaults on religious symbols when it came to a dung-covered Virgin Mary or the Piss-Christ-the crucifix immersed in the artist's urine that was the sensation of the New York art world a couple of seasons back. He was the biggest artist in America for a while, a guy called Andre Serrano. I don't know what he's doing now, haven't heard from him a couple of years, I don't know what he's doing ... maybe he got cystitis or something ... anyway, his career dried up.

A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he's an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing 'we're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus' ... ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing 'we're sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah'. Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door. Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that 'in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President' and the Soviet guy replies 'same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President'. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one had to choose, on balance, Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite's loathing of their own. Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it's on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place. And across much of the developed world, that's what's going on right now.

The advantage for the US and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent. But it comes down to this: we are the issue. It's about us. We don't understand that the world we've lived in since 1945 is very precious, very unusual, and very rare and is at odds with most of human history. And if we want our world to continue, if we want our children to grow up in the kind of society we've lived in this last half-century, then we have to understand the blessings we enjoy are not an accident. If we don't value it, we won't have it.

Thank you very much.

Quantifying Political Correctness

In a previous post I talked about how Larry Summers was being forced from his post as President of Harvard University by the faculty of the Arts & Sciences department for some "controversial" comments he made regarding innate gender differences and their possible correlation to the lack of women in the upper eschelons of science.

Last year, as part of a sentence handed down for insider trading in his own company's stock in 2001, Larry Ellison of Oracle was required to donate $100 million to the charity of his choice. He chose to donate $115 million to the Harvard University Global Health Initiative. One year later, the money has been slow to come, and no deal had yet been signed outside of his pledge. Now we know why:

Sources familiar with the deal claim Ellison delayed the project because of controversy embroiling economist and then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers.
The sources, who asked to remain anonymous because they feared losing their
jobs, said only Summers had the international clout needed to roll out such an
ambitious project, which involved tracking how health care dollars are spent and
what impact they have in the developed and developing worlds.
Summers resigned in February, amid faculty uproar over comments suggesting that differences in "intrinsic aptitude" may explain why fewer women than men succeed in math and science.

Mr. Ellison said he plans to give the money that would have gone to Harvard to a charity that trains teachers and educates impoverished children in the developing world. He didn't identify the institution or elaborate further.

I wonder how the Arts & Sciences Department feels about this?

Appeasement is a Dead End

It appears that Canada's high-minded opposition to the invasion of Iraq has not been enough to offset the damage caused by participating in NATO's efforts in Afghanistan--at least that seems to be the case in the eyes of their own homegrown Jihadis.

TORONTO - Police said Monday more arrests are likely in an alleged plot to bomb buildings in Canada, while intelligence officers sought ties between the 17 suspects and Islamic terror cells in the United States and five other nations.

A court said authorities had charged all 12 adults arrested over the weekend with participating in a terrorist group. Other charges included importing weapons and planning a bombing. The charges against five minors were not made public.

A Muslim prayer leader who knew the oldest suspect, 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, told The Associated Press on Monday that Jamal's sermons at a storefront mosque were "filled with hate" against Canada.

Always, ALWAYS the shock!

Some people who know the suspects said they were astonished by the arrests.

But Faheem Bukhari, a director of the Mississauga Muslim Community Center, said Jamal, the oldest suspect, had taken to giving hateful sermons and preaching intolerance to young Muslims at a small storefront mosque in Mississauga, a city near Toronto where six of the suspects lived.

"These youth were very fun-loving guys, soccer-loving guys, and then all of sudden they were not associating with guys they used to," Bukhari told AP, referring to some of the younger suspects.

He said Jamal once told "the audience that the Canadian Forces were going to Afghanistan to rape women."

I do believe I saw a similiar storyline in the better-than-expected Showtime series Sleeper Cell once.

Suicide Thinkers

There exists in Western civilization a virus that infects a certain percentage of the population. This virus causes the victim to believe that the West is responsible for all that ills the world. They refuse to acknowledge the myraid discoveries and contributions to the World Body of Knowledge that have come from the West; and how our open culture of natural and scientific inquiry has fostered this. They see the world through the twin lenses of "white, male oppression" and "capitalistic greed" and measure all things against a standard nothing short of perfection. To them, all discussion (if they allow any at all) is framed in this manner. There are numerous examples to be found in the current events of today. Not suprisingly, many of these infected minds can be found among the faculties of high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Mostly, they seem to be clustered in humanity departments where political grievances have been turned into courses of study with names such as "world studies", "women's studies" and "(insert your favorite 'oppressed' minority here) studies." They also reside in such prestigious places like the Arts & Sciences Department at Harvard as we found out when they recently forced Larry Summers from his job as president for his "heretical" views.
The following link explores this phenomena and its orgins in the Soviet Cold War propaganda machine. The Islamofacist movement--that explicity threatens all that the West stands for--sees in these infected individuals a valuable ally.
Here are some of the symptoms:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over
Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But "oppressed" people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, "political correctness" to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.

I have to confess I do not know too much about the propaganda war that raged from the 1950's straight through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but Department V did exist, and it's not a stretch of the imagination to believe that they are responsible for this suicide virus that infects the West today.

Antidote anybody?

Thought Police 1; Free Speech 0

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, resigned today. I shouldn't really care too much about this since I have nothing to do with Dr. Summers, Harvard or higher education for that matter, but the circumstances that led to his resignation are what compel me to post on the subject.
In January of 2005 he gave a speech at a conference on diversfication of the science and engineering workforce. He discussed possible reasons for the current underrepresentation of women at the top in many fields, especially in science and engineering. He said that although his remarks were provocative, it was vitally important to study the underlying reasons. These may include social issues, such as willingness to commit fully to a highly demanding career, and biological differences between the genders.

Here's the part of the speech that was so controversial:
"So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong."

This was too much for poor, hyperventilating Nancy Hopkins to bear:
Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Soon after there were demonstrations on campus demanding that he resign because of his "insensitive" and "sexist" remarks. After a month of the situation smoldering the School of Arts and Sciences gave Dr. Summers a vote of no confidence, an unprecedented step in the history of Harvard. Since then it is apparent they have been unrelenting in their pressure for him to step down. Today he finally capitulated and he had this to say:
"I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's future. I believe, therefore, that it is best for the University to have new leadership." (Read Summers's letter.)

Commentary

What I find so disturbing about this entire episode is that the president of what is arguably the most prestigious university in the United States should be forced to resign because he dared to suggest that there may be innate differences between men and women. In other words, he dared to stray from the liberal/PC dogma that the Arts and Sciences department preached and he paid for it with his job. He wanted to generate discussion and instead he got fully censured. I was under the impression that college--especially an Ivy League college--was a place where young malleable minds go to pick and choose from a garden of different, sometimes conflicting ideas and later assemble those carefully chosen ingredients together into what could be called their Philosophy of Life. In short--the university presents, the student decides. If a university president is forced to resign by the PC Thought Police, what does that say about the state of higher education in America in general?
I wish Harvard all the best in finding a new president. Hopefully they will find somebody who kow-tows to the Arts and Sciences department, realizes a university president should be seen and not heard, and above all doesn't court controversy by suggesting debate when trying to find answers to the problems that plague us today.

(I urge you to read the whole speech that got him in trouble in the first place and determine for yourself if his words are sexist.)